


Any Old Lie Will Do

by norgbelulah



Category: Justified
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-04-12
Updated: 2011-04-12
Packaged: 2017-10-18 00:14:33
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,823
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/182879
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/norgbelulah/pseuds/norgbelulah
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ava thinks about something Boyd said to her many years ago.  She realizes how things have changed and how they've stayed the same.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Any Old Lie Will Do

On the ride back from Lexington, Ava thought about something Boyd had said to her once.It happened right around the time that Boyd had returned from Kuwait and Bowman and Ava were just about to get married.

Bowman proposed to her when she was eighteen years old.They were just coming out of high school and ready to be real live adults.Being married to a football star wouldn’t be so bad either, she had thought, and she said yes almost immediately.She knew Bowman had a temper like his daddy, but it hadn’t been that far off from what her own daddy had been like before he passed, so Ava didn’t let it stop her.

They had been debating which of the various venues in Harlan that Bo Crowder had his fingers in the affairs of would be best to host the reception when Boyd came through the door of his daddy’s homestead, unannounced and looking weary.Ava was sure he hadn’t come directly home after his leave began, but he didn’t say where he had been and no one bothered to ask.

He’d smiled brightly when greeting his family, but it was brittle and had put Ava off.She felt awkward around him, and he seemed to look at her so strangely.He told her he couldn’t believe how she’d grown, that he was surprised she’d go for a man like his brother.

She hadn’t been sure how to take that so had just smiled and changed the subject to invitations.

Later that evening, after Bo had gone somewhere or other on business, Bowman had been pissed his daddy hadn’t included him in whatever dealings were going on and had taken it out on Ava.He didn’t hit her, that hadn’t started until after they were married.But he picked a fight with her about something stupid, Ava couldn’t even remember anymore, and it dissolved into childish comments about her hair and clothes.

Ava didn’t like to cry in front of him when they had fights like that.It only ever made him angrier because he felt like he was being manipulated into losing the fight.He was always so competitive, even about that.But as they stood there, in the waning light of the Crowder’s living room, Ava had let slip a tear and they heard a noise from the doorway.

Boyd was standing there, silent in the dark from the next room.They had both thought he was upstairs sleeping, like he’d said before Bo left, and neither of them was sure how long he’d been there. Bowman’s face grew red, though no one said a thing for at least a minute.Finally, Bowman stalked out of the room, slamming the screen door as he escaped to the backyard.

Ava knew he’d throw the football around for twenty minutes, come back, and apologize, but she couldn’t sit down and compose herself— Boyd hadn’t moved a muscle and he was looking at her with that same strange expression on his face.It was like he’d never seen a woman before and he was so awed he didn’t know quite what to do.There was a hint of sadness there as well, though Ava had been damned at the time if she knew why.

She just looked right back at him and lifted her chin a hair, daring him to say anything.She should have known Boyd wouldn’t back down from such a gesture.He was, after all, a Crowder.

Boyd had stepped into the room, just one step, but it brought him into the light and he smiled at her, very slow but still certain.“Oh Ava,” he’d breathed, “if you were my girl…”He made an aborted motion with his hands, but she didn’t understand what he’d been trying to convey and he never finished the sentence.He just turned on his heel, real slow like his smile, and walked wearily up the stairs.

Ava didn’t meet Boyd’s eyes the rest of the time he was in town.She didn’t know if he was looking at her in that way anymore and she told herself she didn’t care.

The next time he came home it was for good, his tour was over, and he was done with the army.She and he had as normal and as strained a relationship as any regular old brother and sister-in-law could, at least until he changed, started spouting that white supremacist bullshit and toting guns around like it was the old west with rocket launchers.

She tried to avoid him as much as she could for the rest of her marriage, though it wasn’t really much at all.He was over all the time, drinking and laughing with Bowman, talking about hunting and bank robbing.He usually ignored her though, as she ignored him, except to throw the occasional proposition her way.She would resolutely ignore these, as well, and he’d leave her alone again after a while.

She only ever caught him looking at her that strange way at the times it was obvious Bowman had been hitting her.That look was what made her hate him, because he knew and did nothing.Everything else she couldn’t really have cared any less.

 

Ava didn’t know quite what to do with herself when they came back into the house.It felt like years since they’d left.

She’d been in the next room when they interrogated Boyd.It was a small office and the walls were thin, so she could hear when voices were raised.And somehow, lately she seemed to be specially tuned in to the particular cadence of Boyd’s voice.

She was careful though, and pretended she couldn’t hear anything.But when that ATF asshole said what he said she had to fight to keep her hands from clenching and when Boyd said he would come across that table, Ava knew, with those quiet words, Boyd had just planted her firmly on his side in whatever fight was coming.

All the hate she had ever harbored for him fell away under the fact that she knew the same was true for him as well.It didn’t seem worth it to hold onto grudges over things that no longer mattered.With those words, Boyd had endangered all the lies they had painstakingly rehearsed just because her honor had been insulted.He’d nearly gotten himself in lock-up over something ridiculously petty and clearly carefully engineered by those federal sons of bitches.

But Ava knew that was how it would be with Boyd, that how it always was with Boyd.If he cared at all, he cared enough to go to jail over how many Crowders ATF thought she’d screwed.And since he cared, she couldn’t hold anything that happened before against him any longer.

She put her purse on the kitchen table and her eyes followed Boyd into the living room.He stood very still in the center of the room for about half a minute, his ratty black coat still on.

Ava was struck often by how still he could be these days.

She understood that the man she lived with now was very different from the Boyd Crowder who’d let his brother beat his wife.  When he was that other man, he’d almost never stopped moving. They were such a contrast, those two brothers, like they’d split their daddy’s traits right in two.

Boyd was so smart, smart enough to have anyone’s number almost as soon as he met them, Ava included, but Bowman had got barely any of that.What Bowman had inherited was Bo’s temper, flaring up and destroying everything in his path whenever something didn’t go his way, and it was almost always Ava who was in the way.

Bowman also got his daddy’s steadiness.He never did anything too swiftly, but he didn’t have the calculation that was present in Bo, and so it just fell to laziness and underachievement.Boyd, on the other hand, was so fast you could barely see him, tearing the pleasure and joy out of life with his teeth, propelling him from one criminal act to another in a terrifying trajectory that made Ava wonder how he hadn’t been caught.His speed seemed to betray recklessness, but it was all an act.He knew exactly what he was doing all the time and that was what had really always scared her about him.

But now, now he was always so still and sometimes it scared Ava almost as much.He held himself like a man who might snap if he was bent the wrong way.He went through his life like he couldn’t bear to touch any of it, like he couldn’t bear to have it slip through his fingers again.Sometimes it made her heart ache.

She let out a breath and followed him into the room.When he heard her come in, he turned and gave her a resigned look, sinking onto the arm chair Ava’s mother had left her.

“What are we gonna do now, Boyd?”She couldn’t help but ask.It seemed she would be turning to him for answers often now and Ava wondered when she had stopped hating the idea of thinking of the two of them as “us” or “we.”It couldn’t have been that long ago, but it felt like ages.

Boyd grimaced and spoke in a muted, quiet tone.“I could leave,” he said, “You can have the money for the house.You’re not in danger of losing it anymore.You don’t need me bringing my kind of trouble down on your head.I can be out—“

Ava felt a jolt of panic run through her and she clamped her hand around Boyd’s mouth.In his eyes was a look of surprise that she had rarely seen before.“Shut up,” she ordered, her other hand grasping his shoulder as she looked down at his upturned face.“I don’t want to hear anything about you leaving.You think I’d kick you out now, after all that’s happened?”

She moved her hand away to let him answer.Boyd licked his lips first, and a strange expression passed over his features as he did so.She thought maybe it looked like regret.“What better time, Ava?Before I bring more danger and strife to your door, at least I can leave you with—“

Ava pushed him into the back of the armchair, and his mouth snapped shut.She thought for a moment he would strike back and she tensed her muscles for it, but he just looked at her with some kind of mixture of confusion and hurt on his face.

“Didn’t I say I don’t want to hear about you leaving?” She hissed desperately, fumbling to reach for him.He caught her outstretched hand automatically in his and she pulled herself close to him by it, falling to kneel next to the chair.“Are you really gonna make me ask you to stay, Boyd?”

He cupped her cheek with his hand, in a movement that suggested he hadn’t even thought about it.She put her own hand over it, realizing she didn’t want him to reconsider his actions.“Oh, Ava,” he said in the exact same way he’s said it all those years before.And she knew this meant a great deal to him, to have this closeness now, after so long.She wanted him to keep it. She wanted them both to share it.

She took her hand from his grasp, spurred on by this realization, and curled her fingers around the base of his neck, leaning up and pulling his lips down to meet hers.His arms came around her swiftly, like he’d been holding a breath he’d just let go of, and she opened her lips for him.His mouth tasted warm, almost spicy.He pulled her up and onto his lap, kissing her slow, like he wanted to take his time.

Time, of course, meant that he’d actually think about what he was doing.

He pulled back and looked at her for a long moment, clearly debating what to do next.She just raised her eyebrows at him until he spit it out.His voice was resigned, defeated when he finally did speak and his face looked tired, “I can’t promise you I won’t lie, Ava.I can’t promise to be a good man for you, because I am fairly certain I have no real idea how to be a good man.”

Ava’s mouth fell open; this was what he was worried about?“What makes you think I give a damn about you being a good man?You think Bowman was a good man?”

“Ava,” he replied, baffled, his hands uncurling from around her waist.“You shot Bowman.”

Ava held her hands firmly where they were, refusing to let him pull out of her grasp. It was kind of funny how lately, the fact that she shot her husband was just another fact of life. She had more important things to worry herself over than feel any lingering guilt. Ava told Boyd information he already knew, and wasn’t sure why he was being so thick about this.“Boyd, Bowman was in it as deep as your daddy would let him be,” she said.“But that wasn’t why I shot him.”

Still, he hedged, “Ava,” he began but she cut him off, digging her knees into the cushion when she thought he was about to get up.

“I’ll make you a deal then, Boyd,” she pushed his shoulders against the back of the chair, making him look into her eyes.“You ever lay a hand on me in anger, that’s when I will shoot you.I don’t care what you do otherwise, do you hear me?I don’t give a damn.”

“But I do,” he said forcefully, conviction coming into his gaze where there had only been longing and temptation before.“You deserve so much more than what the Crowders have given to you, Ava.My presence here has only served to bring new troubles to your door—“

She kissed him again, leaning in fiercely, hoping that would shut him up better than just telling him to had done.He broke away quickly that time, but elected to pull her close instead of pushing away. He spoke low into her ear.“Ava,” he said, a warning.

“You’ve solved as many troubles as you’ve caused, Boyd,” she replied.“You think I didn’t create my own troubles when I killed my husband?I wouldn’t have had any mortgage problems if Bowman was alive, working at the mine.We wouldn’t have seen hide nor hair of Raylan Givens if he hadn’t come here and shot you.That was because of me, my doing, Boyd, not yours. And you’ve been such a help. I would have lost this place months ago if you hadn’t moved in, and you know that.”

He tried to shake his head, but she stilled it with her hands.“When we started all this we knew that it was either gonna work or it wasn’t,” Ava continued, unable to remember the last time she gave such a speech.“Well, it’s worked.I helped you, you helped me, right?”

She combed her fingers through his hair and his eyes shuttered closed as he nodded, leaning into her touch.Her hand stilled and she pressed her fingers flat, moving her thumb across and under his earlobe to the side of his face.He looked at her again.

His expression was disbelieving, but she thought maybe she’d got through to him because his hands gathered her closer.“You’re so stubborn,” he said and that look came into his face from somewhere behind his eyes, the one that made it seem as though he’d never seen a creature quite like her before.“This…I don’t know, Ava…”He trailed off, seemingly for once at a loss for words.

She smiled at him slow and sweet, thinking how much he’d changed, how he was still the same, and said softly, “I’m your girl now, Boyd, what are you gonna do about it?”

A slow, fierce heat built up in his eyes at her words, as if he only just realized what she’d been saying during the entire conversation.His hands were suddenly everywhere and his lips were on hers again.They moved together, giving and taking from each other in equal measure.Ava’s skin began to prickle with heat and she wanted to press herself so close against him, she felt the old frame of the armchair straining underneath them.

Sometime later, Ava couldn’t really tell, Boyd slowed himself and she felt him loose a warm breath as he smiled against her lips.She closed her eyes.“I’m going to take care of you,” he said.

And even if it turned out to be a lie, she believed him because she knew he’d always meant to.

 


End file.
